Crunch Hype

Tor Project, the group behind the anonymous Tor browser, has released an alpha version of its own anonymous browser for Android. Following this release, Orfox, the longstanding Tor Project -approved browsing app for Android, said it will be sunset by 2019. To run both apps, users will need to also download the Tor Project proxy app, Orbot. Tor […]

’Tis the season for hardware events. First Apple, then Google and now Microsoft all have big announcements on tap for the next month or so. Details are light on this one. Same can be said for the invite, which is just a Microsoft logo and the words “a moment of your time.” The event will […]

Rigetti, a quantum computing startup that is challenging the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Google in this nascent space, today at our TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 event announced the launch of its new hybrid quantum computing platform. While Rigetti already offered API access to its quantum computing platform, this new service, dubbed Quantum Cloud Services […]

Harley-Davidson, the American symbol for internal combustion, chrome and steel, is going all in on two-wheeled EVs.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was incredibly fun. We recorded live from the first floor of TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF confab, putting us right in the middle of the action. So it was good that we had a full crew on hand to […]

Twitter is launching a new feature that allows users to create audio-only broadcasts directly from Twitter itself, as well as Twitter’s Periscope. The feature, which Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey confirmed in a tweet this morning, is available from the same interface where you would normally launch live video. It’s currently accessible on the Twitter for […]

Eventbrite has taken its final step toward becoming a publicly traded company. In an updated S-1 filing this morning, the ticketing and events company announced plans to sell 10 million Class A shares on the New York Stock Exchange at a price range of $19 to $21 under the ticker symbol EB. At a midpoint […]

All good things must come to an end, and Disrupt SF is no different. But, in many ways, we’ve saved the best for last. Today we’ll hear from Silicon Valley creator Mike Judge, DraftKings CEO Jason Robins and Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong. And that’s just the main stage. In the afternoon, the real drama begins. […]

Tesla shares plunged as much as 10 percent Friday morning following two high-profile executive departures. Tesla shares have since recovered and were down 5.4 percent to $265.77 a share at 8:20 am PT. The executive departures were just the latest tumult at the automaker headed by CEO Elon Musk . Just hours before, Musk capped […]

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Tim Armstrong is in talks to leave Verizon as soon as next month. Armstrong heads up the carrier giant’s digital and advertising division, Oath (formerly AOL, prior to the Yahoo acquisition and the subsequent merger of the two units). Oath also happens to be TechCrunch’s parent, of course. […]

Starry, a Boston startup, wants deliver high-speed 5G internet in major cities at a reasonable price. Today, it announced it is expanding service from its initial launch in Boston to New York City. The company also announced a deal with Related Companies, a large national affordable housing owner, to host Starry equipment on its buildings […]

Sonatype, a cybersecurity-focused open-source company, has raised $80 million from investment firm TPG. The company said the financing will help extend its Nexus platform, which it touts as an enterprise ready repository manager and library, which among other things tracks code and helps to keep everything in the devops pipeline up-to-date and secure. It’s that […]

The music business is littered with stories about songwriters or studio contributors and session musicians who never get the credit — or money — they’re often due for their work on hit songs. And for every storied session musician in “The Wrecking Crew” there are perhaps hundreds of other contributors who aren’t getting their just […]

As the number of competitors in the ride-hailing industry dwindles, geographic expansion is emerging as the next proving ground to determine who will be the victor in the ride-hailing market.

A popular top-tier app in Apple’s Mac App Store was found pilfering browser histories from anyone who downloads it. Yet still, at the time of writing, the rogue app — Adware Doctor — stands as the No.1 grossing paid app in the app store’s utilities categories. But Apple was warned weeks ago and did nothing […]

Swedish telehealth startup Kry, which bagged a $66M Series B in June for market expansion, is executing on that plan — announcing today it will launch into the French market on September 15. This will be the fourth market for the 2014 founded European startup, after its home market of Sweden, along with Norway and […]

It sometimes feels like the price of Bitcoin rises and falls on the turn of a speculative dime, and yesterday we saw one such moment come to pass, when it was reported that Goldman Sachs was planning to drop a plan to build a Bitcoin trading platform, causing the price of the cryptocurrency to crash. […]

Over the past two days, 21 companies have taken the stage at the Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield. We’ve now taken the feedback from all our expert judges and chosen five teams to compete in the finals. These teams will all take the stage again tomorrow afternoon to present in front of a new set of […]

The startup behind the Meural art frame has been acquired by Netgear. The deal was announced during the router company’s analyst day and was confirmed to TechCrunch by a Meural spokesperson. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Netgear may feel like an odd suitor for this consumer hardware startup, but they were an early investor in them […]

Knowing what's going on in your warehouses and facilities is of course critical to many industries, but regular inspections take time, money, and personnel. Why not use drones? Vtrus uses computer vision to let a compact drone not just safely navigate indoor environments but create detailed 3D maps of them for inspectors and workers to consult, autonomously and in real time.

Don’t call Wingly the “Uber of the Sky” — Wingly co-fonder Emeric de Waziers would like to nip that little misinterpretation in the bud as the French startup looks to expand into the U.S. If anything, the startup’s mission is more akin to carpooling for small aircrafts, helping pilots fill up empty seats in small […]

Google has been heavily focused on serving the needs of Indian web users with the recent launch of apps like Tez for payments, Areo for food ordering, Neighbourly for communities, data-friendly versions of apps like Search and YouTube, and others. Now, the company is launching an app to serve the need of Indian bloggers with an […]

Kinta AI aims to make manufacturers smarter about how they deploy their equipment and other factory resources. The company, which is presenting today at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in San Francisco, was founded by a team with plenty of experience in finance, tech and AI. CEO Steven Glinert has held management and AI roles at fintech […]

Mira, launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, is a new device that aims to help women who are struggling to conceive. The Mira Fertility system offers personalized cycle prediction by measuring fertility hormone concentrations in urine samples, telling women which days they’re fertile. The system is more advanced and accurate than the existing home test […]

Crossing Minds, which is launching in our Disrupt SF 2018 Battlefield today, is an AI startup that focuses on recommendations. The company’s app, Hai, provides you with a wide range of entertainment recommendations, including books, music, shows, video games and restaurants, based on the data it can gather about you from services like Spotify, Netflix, […]

Unbound founders Polly Rodriguez and Sarah Jayne Kinney have long and varied careers. Rodriguez worked for U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill on Capitol Hill before heading to Deloitte Consulting and dating startup Grouper. Kinney was a graduate of University of Cincinnati worked at Puma and then at Esquire and O, Oprah’s magazine. She worked shooting products for […]

As someone who’s had a years-long front-row seat to Russia’s efforts to influence U.S. politics, former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos has a pretty solid read on what we can expect from the 2018 midterms. Stamos left the company last month to work on cybersecurity education at Stanford. “If there’s no foreign interference during […]

This is officially a trend. This afternoon, Slack reported connectivity issues through its official status channel. We can confirm. Roughly half of our messages are going through. And yes, it’s super duper annoying. We're very sorry for the interruption. We're currently investigating connectivity problems, and we're working as quickly as we can to get everything […]

UL, the company behind the tablet and phone performance benchmark app 3DMark, has delisted new Huawei phones from its “Best Smartphone” leaderboard after AnandTech discovered the phone maker was boosting its performance to ace the app’s test. The phones delisted were the P20, P20 Pro, Nova 3 and the Honor Play. “After testing the devices in […]

Vegans, rejoice! JUST’s sustainable egg alternative is set to arrive in stores this fall. The vegan foods company, formerly known as Hampton Creek, will sell the egg-free and dairy-free “egg” in certain grocery store chains across the U.S. JUST co-founder and CEO Josh Tetrick, whose company was valued at $1.1 billion last year, says fans […]

Twitter is testing a new experience for web users, the company announced in a tweet on Thursday. A small number of Twitter users will see the updated version of Twitter for web, which will include access to Twitter’s Bookmarks feature, and scrolling through Twitter’s Explore section, the tweet said and a spokesperson confirmed. However, Business […]

Entertainment has changed. New platforms led by YouTube have emerged to change the dynamic of broadcast media — once dominated by the rigid programming of TV — while the internet has enabled new media stars to engage with their audiences in new, high-touch ways. Developments like live streaming, social media and more have made the […]

Revolut, the new-generation smartphone-based bank which is blowing up Europe right now, has confirmed its intention launch in the United States and Canada later this year, taking its interesting combination of personal banking, crypto wallet and fee-free stocks trading app to main-street North America. Co-founder and CEO Nik Storonsky said the company now has a […]

Google’s Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL are hardly a secret at this point, having leaked out again and again over the last few weeks. But they’re still not quite official. The phones just took one big step closer to real, with Google sending out invites for a “Made By Google” event that will almost […]

Kadho, a company building automatic speech recognition technology to help children communicate with voice-powered devices, is officially exiting stealth today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018 where it’s launching its new technology, Kidsense Edge voice A.I. The company claims its technology can better decode kids’ speech as it was built using speech data from 150,000 children’s voices. […]

For Lori Systems chief executive and co-founder Josh Sandler, deals like the one between his company and the Kenyan government to solve last-mile solutions around the national railroad are about far more than just logistics. Sandler, whose family battled apartheid in South Africa as social workers, township doctors and (more dangerously) as financiers for the […]

Now valued at $5.6 billion, zero-fee stock trading app and cryptocurrency exchange Robinhood is starting preparations to go public. Just a year and a half ago, it was still largely under the radar. But then it raised a $110 million Series C at a $1.3 billion valuation in April 2017 and then just a year […]

Alex Stamos has been at the helm of some of the world’s most powerful companies for the past half-decade and is widely regarded as one of the smartest people working in the security space. Now, just a month into his new gig as an academic, he can look back at his time with a dose […]

Marijuana may still be on shaky legal ground, but the therapeutic benefits of the psychoactive molecules — cannabinoids — inside the plant are solidly established. Unfortunately, cultivation of that plant is resource-intensive and yields only tiny amounts of some useful medicines. CB Therapeutics, a new biotech company launching today at the Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, […]

YouTube TV introduced a new feature to its service Thursday that allows users to pause their service between four-week and six-month periods at any time, as reported by Android Police. Unlike canceling and reopening your YouTube TV account, which users can also do at any time, the new pause option allows YouTubers to return to […]

Twitter has finally put an end to the ongoing controversy over how it has refused to completely shut down the accounts of Alex Jones and his online media site Infowars after a number of people complained about abusive content posted by both: it has finally banned both, on Twitter and its video platform Periscope. “Today, […]

AI startups aren’t SaaS startups. While many AI businesses deliver value via software monetized by a recurring subscription like their SaaS counterparts, the similarities between the two types of businesses end there.

Recent headlines at TechCrunch and elsewhere have been filled with news about data breaches, data misuse and other data-related scandals. But has that actually affected how consumers think about their personal data? A new report from Salesforce Reserach sheds some light on this question. In a survey of 6,723 individuals globally, Salesforce found that 59 […]

Powered Clothing is not a robotic exoskeleton. Not in the standard understanding of the term, at least. Seismic CEO Rich Mahoney wants to make that much clear. “Exoskeletons are what the public understands, with regards to wearable robotics,” Mahoney told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the product’s debut onstage this week at Disrupt. “We’re […]

Yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Jina Choi, the longtime head of the SEC’s San Francisco unit, declined to confirm that her agency is investigating Tesla CEO Elon Musk for his now infamous tweet about securing funding for a take-private maneuver. Choi did pull back the curtain substantially with regard to how the agency — which has […]

A decade from now, ride-hailing will be less than 50 percent of Uber’s business, in terms of transactions, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Thursday at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. The onstage prediction is in line with recent moves by Uber and its CEO to be part of, and make money from, all the different ways people might move […]

A group of workers at Whole Foods Market is leading an effort to establish a union for the Amazon-owned company’s 85,000+ workforce. In a letter addressed to Whole Foods employees, the group — members of Whole Foods’ cross-regional committee — wrote that they are “concerned about the direction” of Whole Foods in an Amazon era. […]

In an ecosystem enthralled with private capital and delayed public debuts, Bill Gurley has been something of a maverick. The former dot-com equity analyst and long-time partner at Benchmark has pushed hard for companies to go public and “grow up,” including at his portfolio company Uber, where he was formerly a board member. Earlier this […]

As a speaker I often find myself mumbling into a microphone with little thought about the sound system powering it. While most PAs are massive affairs requiring a soundboard operator and lots of wiring, I’ve also had to hoot into portable PAs, a practice I rarely relish. But who was I to judge the quality […]

Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder and CEO of social and dating app Bumble, said today that Facebook’s move into dating is a “huge validation, the best thing that could happen to the dating space, maybe ever.” But all the same, the profitable service — which is notable for how it puts women into the driver’s seat […]